Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Average is Bad

A nice thing about market economies is they are generally run by experts, not consensus. This aristocracy is often derided as plutocratic, but as your average person is incredibly ignorant, I think as long as there's competition, plutocrats are much better than any plebiscite. Consider where 35% did worse than guessing on this Pew Research Center test of political knowledge. Questions were all about our two political parties, such as "which party is generally more supportive of restricting access to abortion?" They are all that easy.

This is why the indices are such biased reflections of average performance, your average investor is quite ignorant, and trips over himself needlessly giving money to brokers. They know more than experts on their daily affairs, but on generalizations and higher-level insights not in their bailiwick, they fail miserably. I know literacy tests were disingenuously used to discriminate in the past, but I fundamentally the idea was sound, as currently it is just like letting fans vote on who gets in the football Hall of Fame. Consider this Louisiana literacy test.

14 comments:

Eric: The Constitution was based on the assumption that the citizens had the right to vote regardless of their "qualifications". The States could impose limits based on gender and age and property holding but not based on any tests of "knowledge". As its authors well knew, once you allow the sovereign to turn society into a school, only the clerisy gets to decide who is entitled to vote. Not a great idea.

They asked "Which party is generally more supportive of reducing the size of the defense budget?" and I clicked on neither party (obviously the only correct answer) and they marked me wrong.

Similarly, they asked "Which party is generally more supportive of reducing the size and scope of the federal government?" and I also clicked on neither party and those bean heads marked me wrong on that as well.

The only one I honestly didn't know was John Boehner, and you must admit he is kind of low profile.

Democracy is about people selecting some guy(s) that they trust to run public affairs. Voting is a bit like picking a doctor, you don't need to understand medecine to do it, and picking people you trust is a basic human skill, that is, however imperfect, most likely weakly correlated with literacy/analytical knowledge.

Elections are sometimes presented as if voters are choosing between policy options, but that's a theatrical distraction, operationally you vote for people, not policy.

In this I disagree. Voting is a form of electing a political leader and granting him/her legitimacy. Illiterates deserve representation at the political level, if not, they will sabotage the system or simply non-cooperative. And they are many.

Moreover, I think they are perfectly able to decide who is the best leader for them. In this matters, one hundred people always decides better than one individual. They also predict better the future.

It is true, however, that in an ethnically fractioned society people tend to vote on the basis of genetic closeness and the result will be suboptimal.

The Pew test is so ridiculously easy there is no excuse for not getting them all right. People seemed to have the most trouble with Lincoln's party where only 55% answered correctly. But with only two answers 50% should have gotten this one right, so 90% of the people didn't know the answer. With such massive ignorance about politics, history, civics, government, law, and economics, we can't have a functioning democracy.

Eric, one point to consider is that the Pew political test was simply victimized by internet trolls that intentionally answered the questions wrong (much the way they initiate flame-wars in the comment sections).

Although from looking at the dispersion it would appear that even a hypothetical quiz-"troll" would have accidentally issued correct responses to a few questions.